"In the Thick of It" began with an escapist impulse to make wild yet intimate paintings about the all-consuming rhythms of caretaking, the exuberance and wrestling of both motherhood and childhood and the preeminence of the domestic environment within my life as a ‘stay-at-home’ parent. Emboldened by the Pattern and Decoration movement of the 70's and 80's, I limited myself to imagery from within my house (kid drawings, shapes of roasted sweet potatoes, dot stickers, shadows of trees on the nursery wall, blankets torn apart by my dog) as well as my childhood box of fabric samples leftover from my mother’s interior design business. These layered pattern paintings reference the repetition of daily habits but boast a structure that is wonky and ever-shifting. Playfulness creeps towards the brink of overwhelm. Are these squares cut out from a larger whole? (Wallpaper samples or butcher paper from a toddler’s art desk?) Or perhaps windows into a grander reality? (The maximalist experience of parenthood or a child’s brain exploding with wonder?)

EDUCATION

2015-2017 Master of Fine Art, Visual Studies

Pacific Northwest College of Art | Portland, OR

2009 Summer Studio Program

Virginia Commonwealth University |Richmond, VA 

2005-2009 Bachelor of Art, Studio Art

Magna Cum Laude 

University of Richmond | Richmond, VA

EXHIBITIONS

2024 In the Thick of It | Shockoe Artspace, Richmond, VA

2017 Limbo | The Commons, PNCA, Portland, OR

2015 Merge | The Commons, PNCA, Portland, OR

2015 Spark and Echo Arts Live | Space 38|39, New York, NY

2014 EDIT: A Geography of Scars | EDIT gallery, Richmond, VA; Solo Exhibit

2014 Undiscovered | Gallery Flux, Ashland, VA; Juried Group Exhibit

2014 Healing | Spark and Echo Arts, New York, NY

2013 Coalescence | St. Paul’s Episcopal church, Richmond, VA; Solo Exhibit

2013 EDIT: Coalescence | EDIT gallery, Richmond, VA; Solo Exhibit

2009 Smash It and Grab It | VCU arts, Richmond, VA

2009 Light in the Attic | Artspace gallery, Richmond, VA

2007 Capital One Student Art Show | gallery, Richmond VA; Juried Group Exhibit

2006 Annual Student Show | Harnett gallery, University of Richmond, VA

“Art is higher than reality and has no direct relation to reality. To approach the spiritual in art, one will make as little use as possible of reality, because reality is opposed to the spiritual. We find ourselves in the presence of an abstract art. Art should be above reality, otherwise it would have no value for man.”

These are known to be the words of the great twentieth century painter and art theorist, Piet Mondrian. Whatever nuance the statement entails, it is obvious in this gallery that we are in the presence of a very different kind of art, of artists who have made much use of the Real. Katy Becker paints from observation–directly or indirectly–underseen places inside and along the way to her very own backyard. Sara Tuttle adopts the modernist grid, but only as it were fished out of the scraggly bottom of a toddlers craft cart, patterned to resemble fabrics that may yet touch your skin, or wallpaper steadfastly holding up the ceiling above the action. Each work was made “In the Thick of It,” in pressurized proximity to other demands, hammered out and interrupted by oven timers and tiny uprisings, by women who also are mothers and homemakers. What, then, is its value for man?

By all means, no man exists that has not come through a mother. And no painting here exists except by that nurturing gaze which seeks and treasures the yet-underdeveloped. The writer Edith Schaeffer calls the many creative efforts of homemaking ‘hidden art’; by complement, these pieces that have made it onto such clean white walls are something of the art of the hidden. Walking the city, one would hardly pause long at one of the weedy, graffitied locations Katy has labored to develop into an image that stands to be read slowly in kind. An unmatched toddler sock or fluorescent dinosaur sticker is exactly the thing to interrupt a well-composed room, yet Sara has pasted them at eye-level for posterity in tactile compositions to sustain that tenuous sense of belonging.

‘Hidden’ naturally refers to the creative context as well as the content of the work. Studio practice, like childrearing, is largely a matter of maintenance. The norm that forms every leap and breakthrough is mundane faithfulness, and these women have worn it well. Their paintings testify quietly, yet brilliantly, the rich generativity of patient submission to present needs. In painting as in parenting, drudgery is never so close to the most exuberant imaginative play. 

This constant effort to produce mature people or satisfying paintings may only be sustained to fruition by deep personal commitment. At the bottom of all the mess and longing and labor is nothing less than hope and joy and love. We see this resonate in the images themselves: Katy’s landscapes threaten to be overrun by natural decay–or sometimes the melting point of abstraction–yet the tender rendering remains decisively beautiful. Sara’s allover compositions shiver on the edge of chaos, but formally hold together in a dance that is two-stepped, improvised, and rosy. There is indeed a hope for discovery of spiritual value that merits all of the fugitive hours put away in the studio, and these paintings are what the artists have found.

All this talk of commitment, discovery, tactility, play, and longing begins to bring us around to put some flesh on the notion of the Real. Contra Mondrian, both meaning and things tend to resist essentializing, which has grossly frustrated philosophers for centuries. Lately, philosopher Esther Lightcap Meek has made a happy peace with the complexity of knowledge/the known by identifying them with the irreducible richness of interpersonal relationship. The Real, or that which is, gradually and graciously discloses its being–spiritual or otherwise–to whomever should lean into the exchange with attuned eyes, heart, and hands. These artists have done so with their skilled handling of the subjects they love most; it now only remains for us to complete the gesture of care by approaching such paintings with that same respect due to all really Real things.

Artist talk for “In the Thick of It” 10/26/2024

Hi thank you so much for coming out to see the work and hear Katy and I talk about “In the Thick of It”. I want to give a big thank you to the whole crew at Shockoe Artspace for providing this opportunity and all the awesome work y’all do elevating artists and the visual arts here in Richmond and beyond! Special thanks to Sam Taylor for writing such a brilliant and poignant essay for the show. And lastly I want to give a big shout-out to my husband Sam – who is with the kids at a fall festival right now – for being such a supportive partner and taking the kids to his parents house many Mondays this summer so that I could finish work.

Not to be overly dramatic, but I do feel the need to open this talk by reflecting on how it feels, more than ever, almost an act of resistance to be about the arts in 2024. Perhaps I’m thinking about this more intensely because I am planning to open an art gallery next spring but the reality is that it often feels rebellious to commit precious time in one’s day, week or monthly schedule to something that is as “un-practical” as art. Art is something that doesn’t solve any real societal issues, even if the work is making a direct social commentary or an overtly political statement. Then there’s the reality that we’re all addicted to screens and sometimes I wonder if people still appreciate the in-person experience of beautifully-crafted physical objects and thoughtfully curated spaces. And mostly, there’s just the myriad of tasks and responsibilities in our wildly busy lives. And so, the unwelcome voices in an artist’s head whisper “what a waste of your precious minutes is it to go to the studio and push paint around”. Consequently, over the years of making these paintings, I came to embrace studio time as an act of defiance; defiance against the culture’s panic-strickeness as well as apathy and most importantly, the classically “reasonable” voices both within and without my head.

Artists often chose to make, even when they’re not sure if anyone will see their work or appreciate it, or when it’s likely that they will lose money by being in the studio instead of spending that hour doing something else more “productive”. I’m not in any way trying to make artists out to be martyrs, I think that any time an adult gets to make and exercise their creativity is an absolute privilege. I’m simply acknowledging that among artists and art-appreciators that I know, there seems to be a dogged obedience to some crazy seed of hope that defies all the other messages of our culture. In the midst of a world where the media is constantly telling us that we need to be very afraid and keep scrolling the doom-porn, artists and the supporting partners of the arts say that there is something true, beautiful and important about the pursuit of art and incorporating it into one’s life irregardless of the state of the world. So, thanks for being part of the resistance, folks ;)

Before I get off my soapbox, I want to make it clear that I don’t deny that there are devastating things happening in the world – there absolutely are – I am simply pointing out that the fear, anger or apathy loop and its temptation to have us close up shop and exist in survival mode is in total opposition to the creation and appreciation of art, and, that was precisely the zeitgeist in a very heightened state when I started making these paintings.

In 2020, I was at home with a newly minted one-year old when the world shut down. Each week I would tape a new white sheet of paper to the living room coffee table that, in between our daily neighborhood walks, my son and I would stick stickers to and color on with crayons. At some point during his naptimes, I started actually going out to the studio and cutting this paper up into horizontal bands and collaging them in an attempt to somewhat abstractly represent chunks of time. I was thinking about the rigidity of the schedules we make with small children: nursing schedules, nap schedules, eating schedules, bedtime schedules as well as their gradual change and loosening over time. I was thinking about the shapes found within the domestic sphere that mark time and the repetition of days. I thought about the moving shadows of the tree branches outside my son’s nursery window that projected onto the wall that was viewable from the nursing chair at certain times of day that I would feed him. I used the shapes of cut-up sweet potatoes created by a residue transfer that formed on parchment paper when I would roast them every few days when my baby started eating solid food. I incorporated the shapes of and literal dot stickers that accumulated on top of each other on the butcher paper over time like tally marks that indicate the number of days at sea or in prison J

Since my home had been my primary environment even for the year leading up to the pandemic due to the fact that my son was a high-maintenance nurser with a somewhat late-diagnosed tongue-tie and so I felt pretty homebound when feeding him, I decided to limit the work conceptually – to making paintings about the home, its spaces, relationships and life that is derived within and from it. And I also I chose to limit myself formally, materially and in scale. I decided start with a series of small paintings (so I could finish them). As I said, the content would be the home/house/the domestic realm/parenting a child and a small child’s world within these spaces. Materially, it was less limited but I would seek to incorporate the box of fabric samples from my mom’s interior design business when I was a kid and any fabrics from within my own home. Formally, I sought to switch up the compositional structure and make paintings that were slightly flattened and more akin to patterns. Not only did these patterns reference textiles or wallpaper but in my mind they abstracted the repeated acts of the mundane; the creation of a caretaking schedule or simply the repetition of motions over time that build a life. Yet, I wanted these patterns to be a bit wonky or off. I wanted them to contain interruption within the whole. I wanted them to shift and change as things inevitably do every few months with small kids. 

I started looking into the Pattern and Decoration Movement of the mid 1970’s through the mid 1980’s. P&D to which it is often referred, used decorative motifs and designs as their main subjects. To quote the VMFA’s curatorial write-up on the movement: “…like their forebears the Abstract expressionists, as well as their contemporaries the minimalists, P&D artists employed a flattened paint surface without a foreground or background. However, unlike these other groups, they insisted on pushing against an exclusionary Western art historical narrative by focusing on the artistic traditional relegated to the margins as “applied” art rather than “fine” art…” So P&D could be categorized as a feminist movement determined to upend hierarchies and challenge what made art “good”. There was a subversiveness in their embrace of the ornamental and in the elevation of imagery that people associated with the quote “lower” arts of craft. Amy Goldin – a scholar of Islamic art and P&D’s first theorist in 1977 wrote “Art historians, absorbed in the rational and moral superiority of Western art, seldom notice that most of the world’s artistic production has grown out of the impulse to adornment”. I decided I would embrace adornment and a certain maximalism that was reflective of my own life. Also, being the child of an interior designer – or as they used to be called “interior decorator” or just “decorator” (which nowadays could be seen as a somewhat derogative word). I watched the process of “adornment” enacted on my mom’s clients homes as well as our own. My mom also specialized in “faux finishes” which was very popular in the 90’s and included sponging, marbleizing, antiquing, gilding etc. Watching her put together rich interior spaces filled with window treatments, furniture, antiques and painted surfaces throughout my childhood definitely had an impact on my relationship to the visual language of the home. So in summary, in making these paintings, I was interested in using colors or forms that read as more feminine and decorative but also referenced children/the childlike. I didn’t make these paintings to be a grand feminist statement but I was interested in elevating the domestic realm; its beauty, layers, labors, relationships and importance - particularly because our western culture is often dismissive of it.

I finished two paintings in 2020 and started a few others. In 2021 when I was pregnant with my daughter I lacked the energy to do anything else during my son’s naptime except for park myself on the couch. And, the first year of my daughter’s life was also consumed: tending to kids and all related domestic chores. I started getting back into the studio after my daughter turned 1. Even though she was still keeping us up throughout the night my process in the studio was amenable to exhaustion because there were many mindless tasks required for these layered paintings. All of the parameters that I had set for my paintings in 2020 remained and there were even some more studio limitations: we had moved out of our house for 6 months for an emergency kitchen remodel. And so I hired a babysitter a few mornings a week and walked my dog seven blocks from the apartment we were staying in to the studio, lugging a jug of water because the water was turned off at our construction site of a house. The lack of running water actually forced me to use oil paint again, which I layered over other mixed media that didn’t require water. All I had to do was carry my brushes home to wash them. Parenthood’s constant changes and challenges to time, energy levels and bodily autonomy actually grew my flexibility muscles enough that it was easy to be able to shift media and work with the constant noise of wood-saws and death-metal music right outside my window.

Regardless of what was going on outside, the studio became a semi-sacred space of freedom and play - No matter how punctuated the time was with the checking of baby monitors or texts from babysitters and being what I like to call a super-micromanager. No matter how often I moved between the studio and the house, putting in loads of laundry, fixing boo-boos or disciplining kids, the studio became an anchoring space that it never had been before. And, my practice was revolutionized by a nascent maternal subjectivity – one that was buffered by constant interruption but which actually broke me free from over-thinking and intellectualism and all of their creatively paralyzing effects. I simply had to get in there and make. And so that’s what I did. And then the baby woke up.

There’s nothing like being around children all day to emphasize the importance of play on the human mind, emotions and body. The way kids brains require and crave periods of uninterrupted play where they are able to test and try out things, to make them up as they go along. My studio practice became a space where I was able to partake in this gift. I played with texture, colors, how one material interacts with another - sometimes detrimentally, sometimes like magic. I used acrylic, oil, oil pastel, wax crayon, colored pencil and ink. I carved my own stamps based on my child’s, I used many different kinds of fabrics and experimented a little with Japanese paper. Anni Albers describes the importance of enjoying one’s materials in a 1941 talk titled “Handweaving Today”. She describes “an enjoyment of colors, forms, surface contrasts and harmonies, —a tactile sensuousness. (she says) This first and always most important pleasure in the physical qualities of materials needs but the simplest technique and must be sustained through the most complicated one.” (end quote) I sought after a tactility and sensuousness in my materials that referenced the pure intensity of sensory input and vibrancy of life that often accompanies raising children. And, like kids playing, my process is a relatively open-ended one. I prefer the experience of not knowing exactly where I’m going but figuring it out, like a puzzle – solving problems of my own making as I go along. I like getting to a place where I say ‘hmmm that’s kind of good, how the heck did I get there?” There is no way I could recreate any of these paintings because I honestly can’t remember how I made them. Also, I’d get bored trying. 

So, in closing I want to read a description by Lisa Baraitser in her collection of essays, Maternal Encounters where she tries to define or capture a new subjectivity formed in motherhood because it is by far the best description of the changed perspective of the world that I have read: “maternal subjectivity…(is) characterized not by fluidity, hybridity or flow, but by physical viscosity, heightened sentience, a renewed awareness of objects, of one’s own emotional range and emotional points of weakness, an engagement with the built environment and street furniture, a renewed temporal awareness where the present is elongated and the past and future no longer felt to be so tangible, and a renewed sense of oneself as a speaking subject. The mother emerges from these investigations not only as a subject of interruption, encumbered, viscous, impeded, but also re-sensitized to sound, smell, emotions, sentient awareness, language, love.”

So, in summary, this body of work was mostly about me carving out space and time to find myself again in the midst of being wholly consumed with and absorbed in mothering small children and taking care of the home environment, but the self I “found” was one that had a heightened sensitivity to and appreciation of the world. This body of work is an attempt to celebrate beauty found in the quietness, wildness or even chaos within our interior spaces and domestic lives. I wanted to zoom in on the joy that can be located even in the exhaustion; to celebrate adornment, play, labor and architecture; to draw attention to the beauty of dinosaur shapes, golden hour light on a wall or the form of a singular sock, missing its match. I wanted to remind all of us adults, regardless of whether or not we are parents, of that joy that we experienced ‘being in the flow’ as a child – whether it was first experienced by building with blocks or drawing with stencils. And in doing so, to point all of us, including myself, to the fundamental nature of both the reflective and creative acts for the human spirit. I wanted to reflect on my own life that I felt my nose was far too close to in order to see more clearly. And the picture that I came back with was one that I was immensely grateful for. These paintings were made in pretty total artistic isolation but y’all have become a part of the journey – so thank you for being here.  And I’ll take any questions now.